November 3, 2014

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a social skills presentation, by Jill Cimino and Alison Wall, speech-language pathologists at Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver. Their treatment model of targeting child and adolescent social skills within groups brought back very fond memories of my early career, when I worked at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta Canada. There, I was paired up with another speech-language pathologist and together we conducted group language treatment to language delayed and language disordered preschool children, ages 2 to 6 years, depending on the group. Although I like to refer to what we targeted in our intervention as the “meat and potatoes” of language (i.e. comprehension, vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, etc.), we also worked on social skills (i.e. listening, waiting, turn-taking, topic maintenance, etc.). Those groups were amazing, effective and really fun!  It is interesting and validating to realize that the group model of intervention is still being used.  While many administrators and other speech-language pathologists thought that individual treatment was the preferred format, we always knew we were on to something really valuable with those groups!

Now, back to social development…..something parents don’t always think about with their children, other than politeness conventions such as “please” and “thank-you”. Developing social skills or pragmatic language skills is complicated, multi-faceted and just as important as developing other language skills. If you’re familiar with the fictional character, “Sheldon”, on the television show, “The Big Bang Theory”, you will understand that just because you are intelligent, and have good vocabulary, sentence structure and speech skills, that doesn’t  mean that you will be a good communicator! Social skills are a vital aspect to communication, and being competent socially will help a person to make friends and fit in, and generally have an easier time living, working and interacting with others. To use another television show as an example, “Survivor” fans know that social skills are a very important aspect to the survivor game:  poor social skills and you get voted off the island or…good social skills and making too many allies, and you get voted off the island!  Hey, like social skill development itself, it’s complicated!

So, what should parents look for? The first thing I need to let you know is that there are literally dozens of social skills and I can’t begin to cover all of them here. (There you have it….the reason why getting along with others can be difficult! There are so many skills to master!). But I can give you the highlights of preschool social skill development from birth to five years of age (Winner 2013), and some tips on what to look for in older children.

Babies from birth to 3 months of age are already becoming social beings. They begin to imitate, which is a valuable learning tool, and can imitate sticking out their tongues as well as a smile (No, it’s not always “gas”!). They also develop facial expressions that match how they are feeling.  By 7 to 12 months, babies start to develop emotional attachment and show a preference for their caregivers, respond to their names and learn to point.  They develop social referencing skills such as attending to what you are looking at or what you are pointing to. By 13 to 18 months, toddlers develop collaborative engagement (e.g. the child participates in back and forth exchanges with a caregiver for several turns), and they are able to recognize others’ desires as distinct from their own.  A toddler by 19 to 24 months shows awareness of his or her own feelings as well as others’ feelings. They start to be able to talk about their feelings and begin to develop symbolic play (i.e. the ability to use actions, objects or ideas to represent other actions, objects or ideas, such as pretending a banana is a phone). By 3 years of age, a child can infer emotions from facial expressions and tone of voice, and they begin to participate in group imaginative play. By 4 years, social problem solving emerges and children can use their language to talk about language and thought (“metacognition”). By 5 years, children have fully functional language abilities, can learn in a group, and have solid group collaborative play skills.

So by age 5 years, a child should have a good grasp of beginning social skills, but will continue to develop and refine his or her social competence as he or she progresses through elementary school and beyond. Further development involves mastering skills in 5 different social areas (Taubman et al 2011): awareness (e.g. perspective taking, jokes), communication (e.g. conversational repairs, giving compliments), interaction (e.g. being a good sport, sharing, negotiation), learning (e.g. information seeking, peer culture) and relatedness (e.g. empathy, desire for approval, caring). These kinds of skills are not only beneficial for social reasons, but will also help a child academically, since many social skills are also included in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, being used widely by school boards throughout the United States.

If you have concerns about your child’s social skills, please call a speech-language pathologist for an assessment as problems with social skill development can have wide-reaching repercussions. For more information on social skill development, please see www.asha.org/public/speech/development/Pragmatics/.

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Thanks for reading!

Cindy McCallum, M.Sc., R.SLP, SLP(C), CCC-SLP

Registered Speech-Language Pathologist

Founder, WiseOwlSpeech

Sources:

Cimino, Jill and Wall, Alison. Social Communication Groups and Duals: Strategies and Resources for School and Clinic Based SLP’s. Denver: Children’s Hospital Colorado Dinner Presentation and Discussion sponsored by Colorado Speech-Language and Hearing Association (CSHA), October, 2014

Taubman, M, Leaf, R. and McEachin, J. (2011) Crafting Connections: Contemporary Applied Behavior Analysis for Enriching the Social Lives of Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder. DRL Books Inc., New York, NY

Winner, Michelle Garcia. (2013) (2nd Edition) Think Social! A Social Thinking Curriculum for School-Age Students. Think Social Publishing, San Jose, CA

www.asha.org

www.socialthinking.com